In this week’s update to the Trump Russia Corruption Timeline it appears that Trump never believed that Russia attacked the 2016 election at all, or at least he can’t bring himself to admit its true because several of his people including George Papadopoulos, Carter Page and Don Jr. were all told that Russia had illegally gathered kompromat on Hillary Clinton and instead of reporting this to the authorities they tried to get their hands on it, then lied about it, over and over again.
In this particular case Trump is responding to the release of the FISA warrants for Page which don’t just talk about the Christopher Steele memos that talk about Page allegedly meeting with Putin’s former Deputy Prime Minister and Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin or with Kremlin Official Igor Divyekin who according to Steele told him that “Russia had compromising materials on Hillary Clinton”.
But as usual, Trump’s reading and comprehension skills leave much to be desired.
Just to be fair it should be noted that Carter Page himself appeared with Jake Tapper this weekend to deny everything that was included in the FISA warrant, and was caught in a direct lie when Tapper pointed out that Page himself had previously claimed to be an “advisor to the Kremlin.”
The document accuses you of being an ‘agent of a foreign power.’ Were you?” asked Tapper.
“Jake, this is so ridiculous, it’s just beyond words,” said Page. “You know, it’s — you’re talking about misleading the courts. It’s just so misleading, going through those 400-plus page documents, where do we even begin? It’s literally a complete joke, and it only continues. It’s just really sad.
Tapper, who was still waiting for Page to answer his question, tried again. “Were you ever an agent of a foreign power? Did you ever advise the Kremlin or work with the Kremlin on anything?”
After more stammering, Page finally got around to a “no,” before immediately admitting that he had, in fact, served as an advisor to the Kremlin and met several times with Russian officials during multiple trips to Russia over a period of years leading up to and including 2016.
Page denied in this interview that he’d ever had any contact with Russian intelligence and even went so far as to accuse Eric Holder and Preet Bharara of something untoward back in 2015, claiming that he’d only had one casual meeting with a Mr. Podovnyy.
He doesn’t mention that Podovnyy along his partners Sporshev and Buryakov were indicted in 2015 for being Russian spies attempting to recruit businessmen from New York City and that one of their targets was Carter Page. But the FISA warrant does bring this up.
At the point of the indictment, Podovnyy and Sporshev had fled the country but Buyakov eventually pled guilty to these charges and was sentenced to 30 months in Federal Prison.
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said: “An unregistered intelligence agent, under cover of being a legitimate banker, gathers intelligence on the streets of New York City, trading coded messages with Russian spies who send the clandestinely collected information back to Moscow. This sounds like a plotline for a Cold War-era movie, but in reality, Evgeny Buryakov pled guilty today to a federal crime for his role in just such a scheme. More than two decades after the end of the Cold War, Russian spies still seek to operate in our midst under the cover of secrecy. But in New York, thanks to the work of the FBI and the prosecutors in my office, attempts to conduct unlawful espionage will not be overlooked. They will be investigated and prosecuted.”
...
Beginning in 2012, bURYAKOV worked in the United States as an agent of Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, known as the “SVR.” BURYAKOV operated under “non-official cover,” meaning he entered and remained in the United States as a private citizen, posing as an employee in the Manhattan office of a Russian bank, Vnesheconombank, also known as “VEB.” SVR agents operating under such non-official cover – sometimes referred to as “NOCs” – typically are subject to less scrutiny by the host government, and, in many cases, are never identified as intelligence agents by the host government. As a result, a NOC is an extremely valuable intelligence asset for the SVR.
If you don’t quite know what a “NOC” is — think back to Tom Cruise’s first Mission: Impossible movie where the entire McGuffin of the film was the theft, by Cruise, of the CIA “NOC List” of undercover operatives worldwide.
The FBI had used surveillance on this batch of spies and had specifically recorded them plotting the cultivation of Page as an asset, although they also had called him an “idiot”.
The Russian spies, however, had one promising lead. This was a guy—an energy consultant based in New York City. Unlike the women, he was eager to help. And, it appeared, keen to make money in Moscow. There was a drawback: The source—whom the FBI called “Male-1”—was something of a dimwit.
The FBI intercepts record:
PODOBNYY: [Male-1] wrote that he is sorry, he went to Moscow and forgot to check his inbox, but he wants to meet when he gets back. I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am. Plus he writes to me in Russian [to] practise the language. He flies to Moscow more often than I do. He got hooked on [the Russian state energy company] Gazprom, thinking that if they have a project, he could rise up. Maybe he can. I don’t know, but it’s obvious he wants to earn loads of money.
SPORYSHEV: Without a doubt.
Podobnyy explained he intended to string Male-1 along. That meant feeding him “empty promises.” Podobnyy would play up his connections to Russia’s trade delegation, to Sporyshev, and pretend his SVR colleague might “push contracts” the American’s way.
PODOBNYY: This is intelligence method to cheat! How else to work with foreigners? You promise a favour for a favour. You get the documents from him and go tell him to fuck himself. But not to upset you I will take you to a restaurant and give you an expensive gift. You just need to sign for it. That is ideal working method.
So when the FISA warrant claims that Russian intelligence had attempted to recruit Page the simple fact is that they did, and more than once. In the sections that claim that Page was the “agent of a foreign power” and that the “FBI believes that the Russian Governments efforts are being coordinated by Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #1’s campaign” there are a great many redactions of classified material which would be the specific details underlying that determination.
Those redactions in the initial Warrant go on for a page and a half, then there are additional supplemental redactions which seemed to be based on Page’s direct statements to the FBI during various interviews which most likely were conducted during the 2013 investigation for which he was a cooperating witness.
Although Page denied any contact with Russian intelligence to Tapper he has previously admitted to Congress that he met with Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich and Andrey Baranov, Rosneft's head of investor relations who told him of an impending sale of large portion of their stock, which happens to be exactly the same information that Christopher Steele said he had been told, albeit by Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin instead of Baranov.
Washington (CNN) Carter Page met with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich while in Moscow in July 2016, the former foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump's campaign confirmed to CNN on Friday.
The encounter occurred during a conference in July 2016 at Moscow's New Economic School, Page said, describing it as more of a "hello" in passing than a formal meeting.
Page first confirmed the encounter with a senior Russian government official to
The New York Times on Friday night. He later told CNN's Jim Sciutto the Russian official's name.
...
The latest revelations about Page's trip in the summer of 2016 differ from the details he has shared with the news media over the last several weeks. When Page spoke with CNN's Jake Tapper on Friday afternoon, he said he had only met with academics and a few business people whom he had "known for over a decade."
And there’s this from Pages testimony before Congress:
(CNN) Carter Page's six-plus hours of testimony before the House intelligence committee makes clear senior members of the Trump campaign were aware of the former Trump foreign policy adviser's July 2016 trip to Russia -- and Page may have had interactions with more Russian government officials beyond what he's previously acknowledged, according to a transcript of the interview released Monday night.
...
In his testimony, Page also suggested he met briefly other government officials in addition to Dvorkovich, when he gave a speech in Moscow in July 2016. Page said at the event there were also "a couple of legislators" and "there may be some senior government officials." Page described his encounters as "greetings and brief conversations."
Page returned to Russia in December 2016, and he told the committee that Dvorkovich stopped by a dinner he was attending, which was the second time they met.
In a statement, Schiff said that Page "was forced to acknowledge that he communicated with high-level Russian officials while in Moscow."
This establishes that Carter Page is a liar. It’s not that Page didn't meet with Russian Government Officials, it’s a matter of which officials he met with while he goes on and on about “how ridiculous” it all is. He had been a target of Russian intelligence, and he seems more than willing to minimize and cover up his communications with Russian government officials when it suits him to do so.
The FISA Warrant also makes this same point when it lists Page's own denials of reports about his trips to Russia which were written by Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News in September of 2016 and included information which had been shared with Isikoff by Christopher Steele after he grew frustrated with the FBI’s apparent lack of action.
This leak by Steele to the press is what terminated him as a source for the FBI after the initial warrant — yet there were three more warrant renewals issued after Steele and his information was no longer involved. This leak in September also appears to have been what ultimately caused Page to be dropped from the Trump campaign, which again establishes that he wasn’t a member of the campaign when the surveillance began in October.
When these denials by Page are repeated in the 2nd Warrant application the rebuttal redactions go on for 17 pages indicating that quite a bit of contrary information which may have been uncovered during that initial 90-day warrant that in turn fully justified continued surveillance.
The second warrant notes that Page wrote a letter to the FBI denying the Isikoff report at great length and blaming the Clinton campaign for “severe election fraud, hate crimes, and suppression of dissent” but then immediately following the inclusion of Page’s letter is another extended section of redactions which would be the rebuttal case offered as to why Page still should be surveilled based on classified sources — because we already know he's a liar — other than Steele’s initial memos.
So apparently Carter Page assumed — from the very beginning — that the Isikoff report was coming from the Clinton Campaign in an effort to “suppress dissent” by linking him with Russian Government Officials when in fact he was linked with Russian Government Officials and also spies.
The FISA warrant includes Page’s letter of denial and complaints and then goes on with another 14 pages of redacted classified rebuttal to Page’s claims.
We don’t know exactly what is in those redactions, but looking at where they're positioned in the application, it’s most likely that they don’t bolster Page’s case and were ultimately persuasive to the judges that surveillance of this little lying bag of snot was fully justified.
Lastly despite the false claims of Trump and Devin Nunes along with his four GOP horsemen of frack — Jordan, Gaetz, Meadows and Disantos — the warrant does establish that there were political motivations behind Glenn Simpson (U.S. person #1) and his desire to damage the campaign of Trump (Candidate #1), but also that Steele had been a valuable and credible source to the FBI in the past — specifically regarding the Russia/FIFA corruption and bribery scandal which involved one corrupt FIFA official who was living in Trump Tower, as well as the fact that Christopher Steele had been the MI-6 handler for defecting Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko — and there was every reason to continue trusting the information he was providing.
This section specifically notes that Simpson “never advised Source #1 (Steele) as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s (Trump) ties to Russia. In other words, Steele was being paid by Fusion GPS but he didn’t specifically know — or care — who was paying them, whether it was the Washington Free Beacon or DNC law firm Perkins-Coie, it was ultimately irrelevant to the work he was doing.
And this is why, yet again, Trump is full of shit.
Further daily details for this week’s timeline update are as follows:
- July 17th —
- During an interview with Fox News Putin claims that the hacks weren't a real problem because the information was true. “‘Was This Any False Information Planted? No’” [Actually yes, some of the emails and leaks were doctored and modified to create false negative narratives.’] Fox News Host Chris Wallace tries to hand Putin a copy of the Mueller indictments but he won't touch them.
- Putin later tells Russia State TV that Trump made a “very interesting” offer over Ukraine and that they discussed ways to get around current Russian sanctions. [Yeah, but of course they did.]
- More Putin Press Conference fall out.
- WaPo reports that “Trump went rogue” and ignored the advice of his National Security Team. [No actually, he’s always been rogue and he’s never listened to them.]
- WSJ Editorial board [which is again, owned by Rupert Murdock] trashes Trump for “Kowtowing to the Kremlin” for personal profit. “Donald Trump left for Europe a week ago with his reputation enhanced by a strong Supreme Court nomination. He returned Monday with that reputation diminished after a tumultuous week of indulging what amounts to the Trump First Doctrine,” it began.
- Rep. Steny Hoyer says Trump performance with Putin was “nothing short of Treason”, “Nevile Chamberlain moment” and that “Impeachment is on the table” when Dems take back the House. [Oh, Dayum!]
- WH suddenly summons Rod Rosenstein for a mysterious meeting. [Ruh roh!]
- Trump rants on Twitter that the “Fake news is going crazy” in response to this Putin Summit [I think actually he has that backwards.] “While I had a great meeting with NATO, raising vast amounts of money, I had an even better meeting with Vladimir Putin of Russia,” Trump wrote. “Sadly, it is not being reported that way – the Fake News is going Crazy!” [Stay in your bubble, that’s the perfect place for you Trumpy.]
- Once back in Washington Trump makes a statement claiming that when he said he could see why “Russia would" try to interfere with our elections, he now claims he meant to say he didn't see why they "wouldn't” attack our elections. [Uh, ok, but he also says that “others were involved” even though no others were indicted for the hacks last week.]
- Former CiA Director Brennen says Intel agencies may be afraid to share information with Trump since he’s compromised by Putin. [Yeah, that originally came up just before the inauguration.]
- Fox and Friends Host Killamead begs Trump to "tweet something out to distract" from the horrible Helsinki coverage. [So it’s the Squirrel! play is it?]
- Judge Jeanine defends Trump’s traitorous kowtowing: ‘What was he supposed to do, take a gun out and shoot Putin?’. [No, but not finishing his sentences for him and making apologies and excuses for his attacking America would be a good start.]
- Russian state TV boasts that Trump never mentioned Crimea in Helsinki.
- Former President Obama calls out Russia and the politics of fear and division. [See? That’s how it’s done!]
- Sickened Conservatives turn off the TV in reaction to Trump’s “Total Fucking Disgrace” of a performance in Helsinki.
- The UK reports that personal data from 87 Milion American voters which had been gathered by Cambridge Analytica was accessed remotely from Russia before the 2016 elections.
- Mitch McConnel says that it's "Indisputable that Russia tried to impact the 2016 election.”
- July 18th --
- July 19th --
- Trump goes on CBS for an interview and admits Putin is responsible for what happens in his country [Wow, what a blistering condemnation even though he was personally told in Jan 2017 that Putin ordered the election attacks himself] Then he rips the media saying they’re the “enemy of the people” and they want “war with Russia.” and that it "better not be true" that Russia meddled in 2016. [Uh, yeah, man - they did it for fucks sake!]
- Gov. Cuomo gives the NY Acting Attorney General the green light to seek criminal charges in the Trump Foundation case.
- Ambassador Michael McFaul calls it “chilling” that Trump would ever consider Putin's offer to allow the GRU hackers to be interviewed only if the FSB can interview him about Bill Browder.
- English law enforcement has identified the Russians responsible for the Novichock nerve agent attack on Skripal, his daughter and 2 other people by capturing chatter about them over phone calls made by Russian operatives arranging for their exit out of Britain.
- Rep. Jim Jordan claims the criticism of his response to abuse allegations are orchestrated “by the Left” even when it’s his own old Ohio State wrestling students are the ones saying it.
- Rep. Adam Schiff announces that Democrats wanted now indicted Russian spy Maria Butina and 30 others to testify before the Intelligence Committee but Republicans blocked them, and particularly her to keep from embarrassing the NRA.
- MSNBC Analyst Michael Miller reports that since Trump was specifically told about the evidence that Putin ordered the election attack and he insisted on meeting alone with him that Intel Agencies fear he may be a double-agent who provided Putin with classified and sensitive U.S. intelligence.
- DHS Secretary Kirstjen Neilsen again says she "hasn’t seen the evidence that Russia hacked to help Trump” even Putin admitted he preferred Trump while in Helsinki and it's included in the unclassified version of the original Intel report on the Russian attacks that Trump was briefed about on Jan 6, 2017. “We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electablity and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
- Neilsen also refused to condemn the Alt-Right Neo-Nazi White Supremacist who swarmed Charlottesville and killed Heather Heyer. "it's not that one side was right and one side was wrong" [No, it was exactly that - one side came to stage violence to protect monuments to White Supremacy and Terrorism that were erected to support the KKK and intimidate the Civil Right movement and the other side was standing against their violence and protecting themselves.]
- Paul Ryan calls out the Alt-Right by name. White identity politics… that’s not conservatism, that’s racism’ [Apparently Kirstjen Neilsen hasn't gotten the memo on that one either.]
- Rand Paul goes berserk over a non-binding resolution denouncing Russian election interference - saying it's ‘Crazy hatred of the president’ [So, you're saying Trump is a Russian agent, are ya?]
- WH announces that they "Disagree" with Putin's call to interview McFaul, [And it only took 48 hours for them to say so], then they announce via tweet that there will be another summit with Putin in the WH - and DNI Coats reacts to this news in front of live cameras with "Okaaay, that's going to be special.”
- Carter Page called for a “Spy Swap" between the GRU agents for McFaul and Browder just 2 days before Putin did. [Coincidence?]
- Buzzfeed reports that Microsoft's Vice President announced that Russia is attempting to hack the 2018 elections with a spearfishing campaign targeting at least 3 candidates in attacks that appear to be linked to the GRU.
- Pro Trump Oath Keeper protestors cancel their plan to demonstrate in front of Rep. Maxine Waters South Central office after counter-protestors from the local community show up, take their flag and burn it in front of them while chanting "Fuck the Government, America was never great.”
- The Fresno Bee reports that Rep. Devin Nunes used his PAC to pay for wine tasting Trips to Las Vegas.
- Jake Tapper on Trump asking John Bolton to invite Putin to the WH: ‘What the hell is going on? Seriously. What the hell is going on?’
- Trump just now realized The Apprentice was about apprenticeships: ‘I never actually put that together until just now’ [Actually no, it was a dumb fucking game show where people did ridiculous menial tasks and got humiliated by Trump on camera: "You’re Fired.”]
- Bloomberg reports that Putin pitched a referendum [which would be rigged] to settle the allegiance of Crimea to Trump as long as he kept it secret. [Whoops!]
- VP Mike Pence claims Trump ‘met Russian aggression with American strength’ when he faced off with Putin in Helsinki. [Rather noodle-like “strength" that was.]
- July 20th —
- July 21st --
- July 22nd —
- July 23rd —
Monday, Jul 23, 2018 · 6:55:08 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Huckabee-Sanders claimed today that Trump wasn’t saying the Mueller investigation is a hoax, but that the “collusion” investigation is a hoax — as if those were different things since at least 3 members of the Trump campaign (Papadopoulos, Page and Don Jr.) were all reportedly informed of Russia interference and all of them responded by trying to hide their involvement instead of reporting it to the FBI. If they had reported it, they wouldn’t have been an investigation of them, only the Russians.
She claims that Trump has been "incredibly tough on Russia" and she doesn't understand why that's so hard for the media to report.
Well, that's because it's a fucking lie — Trump’s people tried to end or block sanctions against Russia at least 4 separate times and one of those attempts was what prompted Congress to increase sanctions and also block his ability to turn them off without Congressional approval. Treasury attempted to water that bill down, then when he finally signed that bill he added whining singing statement about “Congress encroaching on executive authority and claimed as a former CEO he can negotiate a better deal than Congress that couldn't negotiate a Health Care Bill.” Then Trump blew the deadline for implementing those Congressional sanctions, delayed them for weeks and shut down the State Dept office that handles sanctions.
All of these sanctions up to this point came either from Obama or Congress, it’s wasn’t until April of 2018 that Trump implemented any sanctions of his own against 7 Russian Oligarchs and 12 Companies in response to the Russian chemical attack in England. There were supposed to be more sanctions after that but Trump ordered them to be stopped.
President Donald Trump on Sunday paused his administration’s plans to sanction Russia for its support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Washington Post reported Monday.
Trump’s move to halt the sanctions, which the Post described as “under serious consideration,” flew in the face of United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s comments on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday that “Secretary Mnuchin will be announcing those [Russian sanctions] on Monday, if he hasn’t already, and they will go directly to any sort of companies that were dealing with equipment related to Assad and chemical weapons use.”
This was after he apparently blew his stack that 60 Russian diplomats had been expelled in the wake of the attack on Skripal.
The Post painted a picture of Trump in a stand-off with top foreign policy advisers on moves seen to be anti-Russian: expelling a large number of Russian diplomats following the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, for example, or allowing the sale of weapons to Ukraine.
“For some reason, when it comes to Russia, he doesn’t hear the praise,” an unnamed senior administration official said, referring to the weapons sales to Ukraine. “Politically speaking, the best thing for him to do is to be tough. . . . On that one issue, he cannot hear the praise.”
The Post described Trump’s rage at discovering, after the fact, that the United States’ expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats following the Skripal poisonings far outnumbered key European allies.
“If you had told me France and Germany were only doing [four], that’s what we would have done,” Trump said, one unnamed official told the Post.
All he’s done, without being pushed or forced into it by Congress or circumstances, is allow Ukraine to purchase weapons to defend themselves from Russia.
Huckabee-Sanders also doubled down and the threat from Rand Paul to pull Brennen’s security clearance as well as Haden, Rice, Clapper, Comey and McCabe’s arguing that they are using them “for profit” and making “false” claims about Trump’ s involvement with Russia.
“Not only is the President looking to take away Brennan’s security clearance, he’s also looking into the clearances of Comey, Clapper, Hayden, Rice, and McCabe,” Sanders said
“The President is exploring the mechanisms to remove security clearances because they’ve politicized, and in some cases monetized, their public service and security clearances,” she added. “Making baseless accusations of improper contact with Russia — or being influenced by Russia — against the President is extremely inappropriate, and the fact that people with security clearances are making baseless these baseless charges provides inappropriate legitimacy to accusations with zero evidence.”
Zero evidence? There are 25 indicted Russians and at least 7 guilty pleas racked up so far.
This is a disgusting perversion of the national security process into a weapon of political retribution and payback considering the fact they Trump allowed repeated wife-beater Rob Porter and Jared Kushner access to highly classified materials while their clearances were in limbo due to their own questionable actions.
Clapper: This is very, very petty thing to do. Typically there would be a formal notification that you are under suspension and being investigated for improper use of your clearance. But if the [Trump] is doing this for political reasons, this is a sad commentary.
That’s incredibly foul and fucked up.